Syrian Refugee Finds Sanctuary in Cycling

A couple of miles before the Lebanese border, at a checkpoint on the Syrian side northwest of Damascus, a bus sits on the shimmering blacktop, its nervous passengers waiting beside it. Syrian border guards are tossing the vehicle for contraband—foreign currency, in particular.

Nazir Jaser hands his dark-blue passport to an armed man in an olive-green uniform. His stomach churns as the guard leafs through page after page of visas from Italy, Thailand, Russia, Tunisia, Iran, Kazakhstan, and Turkey—a compact and colorful record of the 26-year-old sprinter’s five years as the on-again, off-again captain of the Syrian national cycling team.

Jaser has made this trip plenty of times. The airport in Damascus, Syria’s capital, has been mostly closed to civilians since protests in the winter of 2011 disintegrated into a grinding, four-year civil war. Syrian athletes leaving the country usually have to travel by bus, team car, or taxi across the border with Lebanon to reach the airport in Beirut and then on to international competitions.

Today, the last day of August 2015, Jaser is holding a letter from the national cycling federation granting him a few weeks off to visit his mother in Beirut.

The guard glances over the letter and pokes through Jaser’s backpack, which contains a smartphone, flashlight, sandals, a few changes of clothes. With him are a handful of teammates and some of their relatives. His life savings is tucked away underneath the clothing of one of his traveling companions—a woman, who is less likely to be frisked by the Muslim officers.

After an agonizing moment, the guard hands Jaser the documents and bag and waves him back on the bus. As it pulls away toward Beirut, Jaser turns his head for one last look east over the sunbaked desert toward home.

JASER STILL REMEMBERS his first bike, a little red number with training wheels his dad brought home when he was 4. He would cruise it back and forth on his family’s fifth-floor balcony in the middle-class neighborhood of Saif al-Dawla in Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest city. In 1999, when Jaser was 10, his father died, leaving behind a large family that included Jaser, his brother and mother, and nine older half siblings from an earlier marriage.

Without the income from his father’s shoe export business, the family was soon strapped. To support them, Jaser dropped out of school at 12 to apprentice as a tailor. By the time he was 14, he was working 12-hour days at dress shops in Aleppo’s Old City, a picturesque warren of centuries-old alleys and markets that’s listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Nimble and focused, he might earn a few hundred dollars in his best weeks.

On lunch breaks, he would ride five miles home through the center of the city on a cheap, Syrian-made mountain bike a half brother had bought him. There he would wolf down a meal before pedaling the five miles back. He started racing on his days off, and winning local events. Soon he was taking two-hour lunches to train and ride in the hills around Aleppo. At 17, he was recruited by the city’s biggest cycling club and then invited to race with the national junior squad.

A strong sprinter, he continued to rack up victories in races all around Syria, and by late 2010, the 21-year-old was offered a spot on the national team, based in Damascus. The $500 monthly salary was as much as a teacher or cop might earn and meant he could finally give up sewing.

Early the next year, anti-government protests and riots swept the Arab world. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in cities from Algeria to Syria, demanding more democracy and an end to decades of government corruption. In an initial wave of optimism, the movement was dubbed the “Arab Spring.” There were protests in Syria, too, against the government of President Bashar al-Assad, an autocrat whose family had ruled the country since seizing power in a 1971 coup.

Jaser stayed home. He didn’t understand the protesters’ demands, he says now. Everyone he knew had good lives, jobs, and no problems with the authorities, as long as they kept their heads down and their mouths shut. “I’m just an athlete. I was on the national team. I worked for the government,” he says. “If I went to a protest, I’d lose everything and get arrested.”

In some places the Arab Spring produced meaningful reforms. In others, the promise of democracy flared brightly and then fizzled out. In Syria, it sparked a brutal internal conflict. In the early days of unrest, secret police arrested protesters and fired on demonstrations while opposition groups burned police stations and battled with Assad loyalists. When armed opposition fighters entered Aleppo more than a year after the first protests, Syria’s government lashed out with a vengeance.

Jaser was visiting his mom in his childhood home in late July of 2012, after the battle for Aleppo had begun. His hilltop neighborhood, with its sweeping views of the city’s 700-year-old castle and historic center, was a strategic target. “The people against Assad came east to west, and Assad came west to east,” Jaser says. “They met near our house. We couldn’t get out.”

In a cell phone video he took from the window of his family’s apartment, government fighter jets roar through the cloudless sky. In the background, his older brother screams at him to get away from the window. Another shaky video shows the aftermath of a bomb strike on an apartment building down the street, the scene all crumbled concrete and smashed cars.

Jaser heads out on one of his favorite Berlin training routes.

Timm Kölln

IN EARLY SEPTEMBER OF 2015, Frank Röglin sits at a table on the patio in the carefully tended backyard of his tidy, two-story town house on the southern edge of Berlin. It’s his refuge, where he likes to drink tea and read the paper early on warm summer mornings. This summer, though, he has been uneasy. The papers have been full of bad news from the Middle East. When he watches TV at night, the lead story is always the same: a seemingly endless stream of refugees trudging north toward Germany.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has just made a pivotal—and deeply controversial—announcement. Germany, she proclaimed, will allow the hundreds of thousands of Syrians already in Germany to stay—and accept Syrians fleeing the conflict in their country without reservation. Any Syrian who makes it to Germany, in other words, will be granted sanctuary.

The decision electrifies Europe, angering some who think Germany’s generosity will only encourage more people to flee north. For many Germans, though, the refugee crisis is an opportunity to show how much the country has changed in the seven decades since World War II. Volunteers flood collection centers with donated clothes and turn out at train stations and refugee shelters to help new arrivals. Small-town school gyms are converted into shelters, sometimes overnight.

Röglin is less enthusiastic. A longtime power company employee who coaches a local cycling club on weeknights, Röglin was born in West Berlin in 1957. He was almost four when the Berlin Wall went up. In the 1970s, Röglin’s neighborhood, a working-class district called Neukölln, began to change. World War II had decimated a generation of German men and left a huge hole in Germany’s labor force. To keep its postwar economy humming, West Germany invited hundreds of thousands of Gastarbeiter (guest workers) from Italy, Spain, Greece, and Turkey to fill empty factory jobs.

Because the workers were supposed to go home after a few years, their bosses rarely bothered to teach them German. Many Gastarbeiter left after a while, but others—particularly those from Turkey—stayed, bringing relatives and starting families.

The new immigrants were isolated by language, culture, religion, and discrimination stemming from Germany’s uncertain, uncomfortable relationship with the idea of immigration in general. Four decades later, more than half of the remaining three million people of Turkish descent still don’t have German citizenship.

In the ’80s, Röglin began to notice that Turkish and Arabic signs were replacing the German ones on the streets of Neukölln. The neighborhood’s main thoroughfare, Karl Marx Street, slowly became the center of the city’s growing Turkish and Arab immigrant community.

Nowadays, it’s barely recognizable as the neighborhood of Röglin’s youth. “When I take the dog for a walk there’s not a single German shop,” he says. “There aren’t any chocolate stores, just a lot of places to buy Turkish nuts.” The changes, Röglin admits, make him uncomfortable.

But like most Germans his age, Röglin feels the weight of Germany’s Nazi past and the dark stain it has left on the country’s reputation. For that reason alone, he agrees that Germany has moral responsibility to shelter Syrians and other victims of war and conflict.

Still, the native Berliner can’t shake the feeling that German politicians aren’t thinking things through. Asylum seekers have been entering Germany at a rate of almost 7,000 a day. Experts are estimating that Germany will soon be sheltering one Syrian for every 133 Germans. To put those numbers in context, the United States, with four times Germany’s population, would have had to take in nearly 2.4 million Syrian refugees to match Germany’s per capita hospitality. (Instead, the US will grant sanctuary to fewer than 20,000 Syrians in the five years between 2011 and President Donald Trump’s refugee ban in early 2017.) Flinging open Germany’s doors to hundreds of thousands of Arabic-speaking Muslims, Röglin thinks, is a mistake. “We tried this once,” he says. Why, he wonders, does anyone think these new arrivals will fare any better?

Nazir Jaser

AFTER THE FIERCE battle outside his childhood home on the hilltop in Aleppo and a terrifying two weeks huddled in the apartment, Jaser and his family escaped during a brief cease-fire. Jaser fled back to Damascus with nothing but a backpack; his older brother and mother eventually wound up in neighboring Jordan, while his half siblings scattered or hunkered down in Aleppo. Jaser spent the next three years living in a hotel room with his teammate and best friend, a quiet, skinny climber named Yalmaz Habash. The Syrian capital was a heavily guarded oasis, ringed by army checkpoints and rocked by the occasional bomb blast or mortar explosion.

Outside the capital, things were different. What started as street battles between democracy activists and Assad’s police forces in the spring of 2011 snowballed into a deadly civil war pitting the Syrian army against a dizzying collection of rebel factions, ranging from US-sponsored rebel fighters to hard-core Islamist groups.

The quiet country roads winding through dusty olive groves and wheat fields where Jaser once trained echoed with the sound of artillery fire and missile attacks. The twisting, scenic mountain climbs to the west of the city were just as dangerous. Soon the team’s rides were limited to a 40-mile stretch of government-controlled highway between Damascus and the Lebanese border.

Threatened by sporadic fighting as it passed the city’s embattled airport, punctuated by several military checkpoints, and jammed night and day with convoys of troop transports and tanks driving to and from constantly shifting front lines, the road often resembled something out of Mad Max. On one particularly memorable ride, the teammates huddled with their bikes against a roadside embankment as rockets soared overhead toward rebel positions nearby.

As the situation in Syria worsened, Jaser and his teammates continued to travel: to Iran, to Thailand, to Russia and Algeria. In 2013 he competed in the time trial in the World Championships in Florence, Italy. Jaser’s exploits abroad made for good propaganda at home, as Assad’s regime tried to project a sense of normalcy and control. Behind the scenes, though, pressure on the team was growing. Desperate for soldiers, the government was sending men as old as 50 into battle. Even top athletes, once a privileged class, were expected to do their part. Twice, Jaser made his name vanish from the draft rolls—first with a letter from the cycling union and then with a $700 bribe from his savings. “I didn’t want to kill anyone,” he says. “I just wanted to ride my bike.”

Jaser and his teammates Nabil Allahham and Yalmaz Habash attend Friday services at a Berlin mosque.

Timm Kölln

Then, in 2014, something happened that shook Jaser deeply. His teammate and friend Omar Hasanin was arrested. Hasanin was one of 10 Syrians to compete in the 2012 London Olympics. Not even his status as one of the country’s most famous athletes protected him when the police accused him of black-market currency trading. Jaser says Hasanin’s legs were beaten so badly in prison he could barely walk, let alone ride a bike. “After that,” Jaser says, “why should I stay?”

That June, Jaser won the Syrian national road championships. In the weeks that followed, he began meeting in secret with his roommate and a few teammates at a restaurant in downtown Damascus. Together, they hatched an escape plan.

THE JOURNEY OUT OF SYRIA will unfold like this: The group will take a bus to Lebanon, then a ferry to Turkey and an inflatable rubber boat to Greece. From there they will make their way via ferry, train, foot, and bus to safety in Germany.

Jaser sells his bike, tools, and helmet and manages to raise $3,000, enough to pay for the passage to Europe. Some of his teammates, too, sell their possessions or borrow money from their parents, or from relatives already living abroad.

As word of the plan spreads, the group grows from Jaser and a few teammates to include a coach’s wife and 7-year-old daughter, Habash and his wife, Zenab Hwetli, and several other relatives and friends, for a total of 14.

After the three-hour bus ride from Damascus, the group arrives in Beirut. From there it takes two days to get to Turkey. To avoid a paper trail that will tip off Syrian authorities, a teammate’s father has booked the group tickets on a ferry from Beirut to Mersin, a port city on Turkey’s southern coast. And a sympathetic official at the national cycling federation has given Jaser and his teammates permits to leave the country for a brief vacation.

Nazir Jaser

From Mersin, the group takes a bus to Izmir, a Turkish port that’s due east of Athens and just a few miles from the farthest Greek islands. There, the group pays smugglers $1,200 apiece to arrange passage. They spend two nights hiding in a hot, dusty clearing in a forest outside Izmir with a few dozen other refugees before a van arrives to take them to an isolated stretch of coast, where the lights of the Greek islands are visible on the horizon just a few miles across the water. Jaser runs the last few hundred yards through the dark forest carrying the coach’s daughter, who can’t keep up with the smuggler’s pace.

Jaser’s money buys him a four-hour ride on an overcrowded rubber boat through the night to a gravelly beach in Mytilene on the Greek island of Lesbos. Smugglers pack 50 people aboard, and Jaser worries the tiny outboard motor will fail and strand them at sea or that they’ll be towed back to Turkey by the Greek coast guard or that a wave will flip the overloaded vessel. Even then, he says, “I wasn’t afraid; I’m a great swimmer. But I was afraid for the women and children.” Jaser knew the flimsy, overcrowded rubber craft favored by smugglers could capsize or founder. In 2015 and 2016 alone, hundreds of refugees lost their lives on crossings from Turkey to Greece—a toll that increased once enterprising merchants started selling counterfeit life jackets.

Once on dry land, the group walks to the island’s harbor, where Greek police use billy clubs to herd the refugees onto an Athens-bound ferry. From Athens, they board trains that head north through tiny Macedonia and into Serbia, where police swing batons to corral thousands of refugees at the border. Jaser is left with bruises on his arms that take a week to fade. In Hungary, police take his fingerprints and throw him in jail for 24 hours with dozens of others, until buses arrive to move them on to the Austrian border.

At each border crossing, Jaser and the group join thousands of people walking for miles—desperate men, women, and children from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Eritrea, and elsewhere. In big cities, food is easy to come by—the refugees buy sandwiches and pizza. But in long lines at border crossings there are only meager provisions: apples, bread, and tomatoes local police or charities hand out. Sometimes there is nothing at all for days. The countries and cities begin to blur: Belgrade, Budapest, Vienna­—a jumble of trains, buses, footpaths, and police.

In Vienna, the group breaks up, hoping to cross into Germany while avoiding the police who are assigning new arrivals at random to shelters across the country. In Munich’s cavernous train station, Jaser, Habash, and Hwetli stroll arm in arm past officers, attempting to look like nothing more than a few friends on their way from somewhere to somewhere else. They want to be in Berlin, assuming the capital city will have the most money and the top cyclists just like in Syria. The trio heads for the bus station and boards a night bus headed north.

The first thing Jaser does after he steps into the Berlin sunlight is snap a photo of the city’s distinctive radio tower. He’ll later post it on Facebook to let folks back home know he’s arrived safely. Habash’s sister had fled to Berlin a few years earlier; the group, now down to 10 after some joined relatives elsewhere in Germany, reunites at her tiny apartment, showers, and then spends the afternoon visiting the city’s sights.

Constant worry and lack of food and sleep has stripped 10 pounds off Jaser’s already lean frame in the 16 days since he left Damascus. And after that first heady day comes a swift reality check: Glamorous Berlin is actually one of Germany’s poorest and most indebted cities. The capital’s bureaucracy is overwhelmed by the tens of thousands of newly arrived refugees.

HIS FIRST WEEK IN TOWN, Jaser spends seven 12-hour days standing outside the office responsible for registering refugees, waiting in seemingly endless lines for the paperwork required to find and pay for housing. “For a while there, I wanted to go back to Syria,” he says. His persistence pays off, and eventually the group finds a place to live: four to a room in a one-story outbuilding hastily converted to housing and sandwiched between train tracks and a row of warehouses toward the end of one of Berlin’s many subway lines.

It’s time to start riding. The group gathers over Jaser’s well-used Samsung, using its translation and search functions to look for Berlin’s “cycling headquarters.” There are five of them: Jaser, Habash, two quiet members of the junior team, and Nabil Allahham, a 23-year-old university graduate whose fluent English has made him the group’s designated translator and fixer.

The guys talk their way into the Berlin velodrome, a hulking concrete structure that they would later discover hosts more rock concerts than track races. Inside they ask for Dieter Stein, a Berlin cycling impresario and former East German track star whose name they had found online. Pulling out their Syrian licenses, Allahham explains in English that they want to race. Stein brushes them off. He has no time for a handful of random refugees with no bikes and no German.

Undaunted, Jaser and the others return a few days later. Finally Stein tells them to come back in a week—with a German speaker. When they arrive, they’re greeted by two camera crews, some local sports reporters, and a gaggle of cycling officials. Stein gives them jerseys and loaner helmets and puts them on old steel track bikes he’s scrounged up. It’s a feel-good story. “Berlin Cycling Officials Give Refugees Reason to Smile Again,” reads one tabloid headline the next morning.

For Stein, the event was a one-off. But Jaser and his teammates show up each week, pedaling unsteadily lap after lap. They have never ridden fixed-gear bikes before, let alone on a banked wooden track. Finally fed up, Stein asks a friend who coaches a team at the track: Does he want to teach some Syrian refugees, fresh off the bus, how to ride?

Jaser trains on an ergometer at the Berlin velodrome.

Timm Kölln

AS HE WATCHES THEM circle the velodrome, it’s immediately obvious to Frank Röglin that Jaser and the others are for real. A few months off wasn’t enough to erase the stamp of years in the saddle. Besides, Jaser’s results—a list of solid finishes in pro races, albeit many in places Röglin can’t pronounce—were available to anyone with Google.

Röglin may be an immigration skeptic, but he’s a cycling fanatic with nearly a half century of experience in Berlin’s tight-knit cycling scene. Compact and powerful, Röglin was an avid bike racer during the ’60s and ’70s—boom times for German cycling. He was good, but never quite good enough to make it as a pro. He kept trying a little too long, perhaps, working part-time well into his 20s to train and race, hoping for the right break. Eventually, reality came calling. At 32, Röglin became a father to his second child. “I had to decide,” he says. “How did I want to spend my time?” He got a job at the local power company, working his way up the ladder, and devoted weekends to cycling—first as a race official, coach, and trainer, then as a proud father and chauffeur as his son Hendrik blossomed into a promising junior racer who brushed elbows with the likes of Andy Schleck at races all over Germany.

He recognizes a bit of himself in Jaser, Habash, and the others: men who live and breathe cycling beyond any rational explanation. He sees a bit of his son, too, who left the sport at 24. And, Röglin admits, he likes them—despite his many doubts and fears that they would be unable to fit in or unwilling to work and wind up as a drag on German society. “They were nice, friendly,” Röglin says. “The opposite of what I expected from Syrian refugees.”

The unlikely group—a reluctant Röglin and his refugee bike racers—begins meeting a few evenings a week to train on the track using borrowed bikes. Röglin refers to Jaser and the others as “the boys.” They call him Coach Frank. He gets them membership in the Neukölln Racers Union Luisenstadt 1910, the local club he helps run.

Frank Röglin at home in Berlin, where he likes to paint cycling miniatures in his spare time.

Timm Kölln

As winter wears on, he realizes he’ll have to find them road bikes if they’re going to train and live up to their full potential. And the more time Röglin spends with Jaser and the others, the more he realizes the scope of their needs: They need help with housing, with German, with seeking asylum, and with eating, sleeping, and training like elite athletes on the roughly $120 a week they get from the German government. If he’s going to be their coach, he has to make it possible for them to be athletes again.

Almost without noticing, Röglin becomes a cross between coach, fixer, and father. He sometimes shows up unannounced at Jaser’s German classes to check on his progress. At Röglin’s kitchen table, Jaser puzzles over stacks of forms: applications for asylum, unemployment, and welfare; transfers from one refugee shelter to another; racing licenses; and job applications.

To Röglin, “the boys” are bike racers first, refugees second. But he’s still skeptical: Each knot he unties leads to more complications. If his boys, elite athletes brimming with talent and motivation, can barely navigate their way through Germany’s bureaucracy, how are the hundreds of thousands of other Syrians ever going to make it?

Not everyone is as welcoming. Longtime members of Röglin’s club team gripe that the new arrivals are getting more than their fair share. When Röglin convinces a local casino to donate enough money to buy five entry-level road bikes, the grumbling gets louder.

Everywhere Röglin looks in Berlin, the same scenes are playing out. Germans who can’t find apartments or day-care slots for their kids resent refugees who seem to be jumping ahead of them in line. The euphoria and excitement that greeted people in 2015 are wearing off as the true cost of absorbing the new arrivals becomes apparent.

In early 2016, a few months after Jaser’s arrival, Germany quietly shuts its doors. Syrians could stay, but asylum seekers from many other countries—including Afghanistan and Iraq—are denied refugee status and served deportation notices. And Germany and other European countries work out a deal with Turkey: In exchange for billions in aid money, the country agrees to close off its beaches and other borders to smugglers and take back any asylum-seekers who make it to Greece.

COMPARED WITH THE ITALIANcarbon-fiber bike Jaser sold before leaving Syria, the entry-level aluminum one bought with the casino money is a clunker. But for Jaser, who spent a long winter circling the velodrome and dreaming of more, it’s a start. As it had since his childhood, cycling is something Jaser can organize his life around, the time on the bike an escape from the uncertainty and doubt that fill a refugee’s days. In the mornings, he goes to German class with Habash, Allahham, and a handful of other teammates and friends from Syria. After five hours of vocabulary lessons and grammar drills, he rides the subway back to the room he shares in a refugee shelter. In the afternoons and evenings, he rides hundreds of miles a week.

On Fridays Jaser goes to prayer services at a mosque near the shelter. Inside, hundreds of men pack into a low-ceilinged room above a discount supermarket, kneeling shoulder to shoulder on a carpet. Jaser likes the mosque’s regular imam, a young guy from Tunisia who wears a long white tunic and knit skullcap and tells jokes and preaches the importance of peace and love. The rolling, singsong Arabic sermons remind him of home. At other Berlin mosques the services are in Turkish, which Jaser doesn’t speak. And some may be worryingly radical, like the one in Neukölln that he has heard is under 24-hour police surveillance.

Sometimes he struggles to reconcile his faith with the expectations he faces in Germany. When the Muslim holy month of Ramadan falls in the middle of summer, a furious Röglin threatens to scrap the whole project unless Jaser and the others agree to eat during the day. After Röglin reads in a German translation of the Quran that Ramadan’s fasting requirement could be broken in case of dire need, they arrive at a compromise: Jaser agrees to eat on race days, and Röglin agrees to let him skip eating and drinking from dawn to dusk—up to 20 hours straight at Berlin’s northern latitude—during the rest of the week.

Language is a problem, too. When Jaser first showed up for group rides and weeknight training races, local racers often would ignore him. He’d bristle silently at the assumptions in their eyes, at the way they talked to him like he was a child or an idiot, at questions they posed, at all they didn’t know about where he came from. Jaser’s ever-present smile fades when he recalls the time someone asked him if Syrians had cars or the Internet. “They sometimes think Syria is the Sahara, and we all live in tents,” he says. Others would muse out loud about what a nice life the refugees must have, riding bikes in the afternoon and sleeping the rest of the day while Germans work. Jaser’s answer to all of it is to train harder and ride more. He finds most Germans warm up a lot once he drops them a few times.

Jaser is in regular contact with family and friends, some of whom send videos of the realities at home.

Timm Kölln

Slowly, Jaser begins to feel like a bike racer again. Röglin enters his squad of Syrians in local races, paying the entry fees out of his club’s funds or finagling waivers in the name of integration. The first few times, they crash on unfamiliar cobblestones and wet leaves, or get lapped. Within a few months they’re placing in the top 10. “They integrated themselves with their results,” Röglin says with pride. “They earned respect as athletes.”

By the last local race of the season in mid-September 2016, Jaser and Habash beat a field of Berlin’s best amateurs and semipros to place first and second. Karsten Niemann, an ex-pro whose Shop4Cross bike shop outside of Berlin sponsored the Syrians for a few months, remembers the pivotal moment, when the pair had a gap of just a hundred yards and were still miles from the finish line. “Any German rider would have sat up right there,” Niemann says. “Those two wouldn’t give in.” The finish line photo—Jaser bellowing, his arms in a victory salute—immediately becomes his Facebook profile picture.

IT’S A RAINY, COLD FRIDAY, the last one in February 2017. Jaser’s been up since dawn, riding a secondhand folding trainer he set up next to his single bed. The shelter doesn’t have Wi-Fi, so Jaser spends part of his monthly allowance on an unlimited data plan for his phone. He usually uses it to stream YouTube videos of the Tour de France. This morning, though, he watches German-language documentaries about Hitler and WWII-era Berlin with Arabic subtitles, hoping to learn something about German history as beads of sweat drip from his nose.

Months ago, Jaser successfully completed the 600-hour “welcome course” the German government provides for refugees, graduating to an upper-level class after a few months off. Learning a new language in the space of a year is a remarkable achievement, especially for a man who dropped out of school at 12 and hadn’t seen the inside of a classroom in almost 15 years.

Even if Coach Frank didn’t mention it every time they talked, Jaser knows he has no future in Germany without the language. In a red notebook he keeps near his bed, he carefully writes down new words. German words, written left to right, go in one column. Arabic translations, written right to left, go in another. The words meet in the middle of the page—words like “arm warmers,” “homeland,” “shoe covers,” “residency permit,” “cycling computer,” “suffering,” “flee,” and “bombing raids.” Words like “surprise.”

Jaser and teammate, Tarek Al Moakee, during a practice at the Berlin velodrome.

Timm Kölln

A few days ago, Jaser got a call from Röglin. Dieter Stein—the same Dieter Stein who had used Jaser and his friends for cheap PR—has agreed to let Jaser, Habash, and 19-year-old Tarek Al Moakee join his KED Stevens team for a two-week training camp on the Spanish island of Mallorca. If they can keep up, Stein said, he’d take them to races, giving them a chance to show their stuff on the national level.

Since he heard the news, it’s been a scramble. Jaser spent yesterday at the unemployment office, getting permission to leave the country. In a few days he’ll pick up an orange and blue team bike and uniform from Stein’s storeroom. Röglin will help him pack it up and drive him to the airport.

Today, though, is Friday. Jaser stows his bike on the balcony, showers and slides his spotless white road shoes neatly under his bed. He pulls on a neon-green “Yo! MTV Raps!” cap, tight jeans, and black sneakers. He walks a few blocks to the mosque with the funny imam who talks about forgiveness in musical Arabic.

Later, in his room at the end of the day, he thinks about a video he’s been watching lately on his cell phone. In a shaky, seven-minute clip Jaser’s half brother recorded in Aleppo and sent him in mid-January, not long after government troops finally seized control of the city, there’s a shattered staircase that rises into a room with no walls. Piles of shattered concrete and wet plaster cover the floor; there are gaping holes in the ceiling. The furniture has all been stolen, the floor above is completely gone. It’s the first time Jaser has seen his home in four years.

Some of Jaser’s half brothers are still in Aleppo. The rest fled to Turkey, Jordan, and Egypt. His brother and mother now live in Saudi Arabia. With no money to sponsor them in Germany and no way to get a visa to Saudi Arabia, Jaser has no hope of seeing them any time soon. The more Jaser thinks about his future, the farther away Syria seems. “In eight years, if I have a good job and know the language and pay my taxes and my bills, I’ll get German citizenship,” he says. “I really want that.”

The question of a job is pressing for another reason: The German unemployment office pays for his room in the shelter and gives him a monthly allowance of about $500 as long as he’s taking language classes. When he finishes his new class, he’s expected to find a full-time job, or at least look for one—and in the eyes of the German state, “aspiring bike racer” doesn’t count.

That means the next few months will be crucial. If he can impress the right person, there’s a slim chance he’ll be able to sign with a Continental team, the lowest rung on the European pro ladder. He’s come to realize that the European scene is full of aspiring pros, many much younger than he is. And now that he’s competing with hungry young racers from all over Germany, it’s clear the level here is much higher than what he contended with in Iran, Turkey, and Syria.

Jaser’s got high hopes for Mallorca and for the season ahead. He’s training four to five hours a day, taking German class in the evenings, and racing wherever he can on weekends. Praying every day. And he’s applying the same determination that once took him from the sweatshops of Aleppo to the start line of the World Championships in Italy—and through seven countries by boat, ferry, train, bus, and on foot to a new life in a new country.

He’s seen the images of Aleppo as it is now. But he prefers to think of his home city the way he remembers it, with its bustling, centuries-old markets and schools, the view of the old citadel from his family’s apartment, the mosques and parks and stadiums and shops. He recalls the way it looked before the bombing started, the way it was when he was racing his bike through its shady streets and stone alleys with the recklessness and passion of a child. He knows that the Aleppo of his childhood is gone forever. His future, whatever it might bring, is here in Germany.

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